Sei Jin's Rejects
Monday, December 13, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
It's been a good run...
Our final design actually removed the blocking wall on the stationary bot, and the lifting arms on the rover that are pictured above to fall in the legal weight limit and avoid breaking rules about blocking.
Personal Reflection
Course Reflection
When I first signed up for ME250 I was excited that I was finally going to be able to apply what I learned in my other classes to create something. I was previously informed that this class would be a lot of work, so I knew that I would have to commit a lot of time. The purpose of this class was to teach us the design process, manufacturing methods, team work, and engineering. I had previous design and manufacturing experience and this class further refined my skills. I had previous CAD experience, but it was nice to learn a new program. This class helped me learn how to design parts that were producible by inexperienced machinists. I learned a lot about bearings and linkages in lecture which was useful in designing our project. I found out that CAD can take a very long time and sometimes, you have to make different versions of the same thing to achieve the desired results. I enjoyed learning how to use the laser cutter and water jet, because they were very useful in the building of our project. The most difficult part of this class was the fast paced build cycle. What made the limited time especially difficult was the limited shop time. I also learned how to design within constraints (Rules) and a budget. As a team we had to adapt to each other’s class schedule and personal lives. Being in a team like this is a great experience, but it also requires a lot of patience and time. If I were to start over, I would force my team to finish earlier and test the hell out of our machine. I would find a better way to manage my time and become more efficient.
Even though I learned a lot, I feel that the class could be improved. I felt that we spent too much time going over the design process and creativity. We should have formed groups earlier and started the project a few weeks before the time we actually started it. I think that if we were given a budget equivalent to the cost of the provided kit, then teams could have been more creative in their design. A lot of the provided parts were not very useful and I feel as if teams could have chosen to use better motors and gear boxes. Another problem I found was that the provided tables were not built like in CAD and were substancaily different and caused our team many problems and caused our machine to fail. Another thing I did not like was that the rules kept getting changed which made it difficult to finalize a design and it ended up costing use time. I wish we could have done the motor lab earlier so that it could have been useful to our design process. The bike lab was not necessary and we could do without. If more time were given to test, more of the teams would have been successful at competition including ours. So basically the things that I think need to be improved are to start the project earlier, let each team chose its resources, and to have a competition table built to specifications. Overall this class was a lot of work, but I did learn a lot so I think it was a success.
Personal Course Reflection
This class taught me a lot about what goes into the designing process. I learned that one has to think about almost everything from how we are going to machine a part to leaving enough room for a screw head. It was definitely an experience unlike any other I have had before. As for the manufacturing side, this experience has given me a lot of practice with machining on the mill. It helped me work on techniques and also reading engineering drawings. The machining experience also gave me a feel for how important machining tolerances are and how to properly tolerance parts based on how precise they need to be. Also I learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best. As for the teamwork side, the project helped me realize that a good group effort up-front leads to a much easier end result. When everyone works together from the start it just keeps rolling throughout the project. Time management was key to this project and was definitely eye-opening when realizing how much time and work needed to go into this project from the machining to the homework and MS assignments. Budgeting for time was necessary in the project and that was evident mid-way through. Time lost was not able to be regained and with all other classes piling up, it definitely hit us hard.
One way the course could be improved is more instruction. When leaving this up for such subjective grading, it is hard to interpret what the grader wants to see. I understand that its all about how well you do relative to others, but at some points we had to guess what was meant by the instructions on some of the homework. Even asking the professors for help was vague and unclear. Also, I feel as though there was a lot of homework and lab projects that did not pertain to the material in lecture. It was not connected well and the relation between lecture material and homework could definitely be improved. In addition, the lectures on the different mechanical components was nice but boring. Maybe going through a class or lab design of a simple device would have been good in order to get a general feel for the design process. I think that the material on the exam was briefly touched on. The lectures gave us quite a bit of material and didn't focus enough on any of it, which made it difficult to know what to study. With so much information, it was hard to figure out what was going to be on the exam. Also, starting off with more about the design process would have helped our team because we would know more about how to properly design something instead of making drastic changes down the road near the end of the project.
One way I could have improved my performance in this class was putting forth more effort in the beginning with the homework and getting a head start with the teamwork. We waited a little too long to dive into our project, and when we did, all of our other classes started to get heavy as well.